Saturday, July 14, 2012

I am going to take a short break from writing the Desirism wiki to address this request from the studio audience.

Would be interesting to see how you think the “moral compass” of the Obama administration stacks up to your criteria for judging the Bush administration.

The comment came as a follow-up to an article I wrote during the Bush Adminstration objecting to the fact that 31% Americans still supported an administration that had done so much evil. I argued that our nation's moral compass must be broken.

A fair question.

I want to premise my remarks by noting that the last President I actually admired was George Bush senior. I consider him to have been a committed public servant who was willing to take advice and to work with others for the benefit of the country.

I am quite impressed with the Obama administration, but it tells us that the moral compass of the American people themselves has not improved much, if at all.

He has had some difficult situations to work with. To illustrate the problem, imagine a case in which a villain has broken into a man’s home and taken him and his 10-year-old daughter hostage. He tells the man, “Either you have sex with your daughter while I watch, or I will take this small butane torch and slowly burn every inch of skin on your daughter’s body.”

We are assuming that the father cannot overpower the villain – that his choices are exactly those listed.

I cannot condemn the father who has sex with his daughter – even though it is a contemptible act under normal circumstances.

Obama tried to shut down Guantanamo Prison and give the prisoners there civil trials in the United States. That was remarkable and more than I actually hoped for. Unfortunately, the Congress prohibited all funding for this option, and a substantial portion of the American people sided with Congress. The Administration ultimately backed down, but even here asserted that they were right in principle.

The fault lies with a substantial portion of the American people have come to believe that the whole idea if a right to a fair trial is un-American. Real Americans prefer a presumption of guilt followed by a quick lynching. The lack of support the Administration got on this issue taught them an important lesson - supporting judicial rights in America is a waste of time.

This lesson applies to many of the injustices implemented by the Bush administration. I wrote, even before the 2008 election, that no Democrat would be able to repeal those laws. Attempting to do so would make him or her a one-term President, with the Republican replacement putting those laws right back in place the instant the President got into office. Furthermore, any successful terrorist attack under a Democratic president will guarantee a Republican President at the next election. These facts describe the context in which a Democratic President must operate.

If we want these laws removed – seriously – then what we have to do is to go the people and restore their respect for civil rights. As long as the American voters condemn a right to trial by jury as some sort of liberal sissy pandering to criminals, we cannot expect a sitting President to successfully push for a right to trial by jury.

As long as voters demand that a sitting President be willing to kill American citizens shown to be working for enemies of the country without a trial, then that is the type of President we will have. The only way to compare the moral character of a President is in terms of qualities other than those that the people themselves are demanding.

I hold in moral contempt those who condemn Obama because of the continuing of these policies. It is like holding the father in my example above in moral contempt for the rape of his daughter. Yes, it’s a horrible situation. Yes, something should be done to change it. However, the President is not all-powerful in this country. The voters are. These evils are not to be blamed on the President. They are to be blamed on the American voters – or, at least the those that support these policies (including those who claim to oppose them but who would refuse to vote for any President who “makes me feel safe”) and are willing to fight for them, and those who oppose these injustices but are unwilling to fight against them.

Another example of this misguided judgment comes from those who condemn the Obama administration for a law allowing the US. MIlitary to detain US citizens without a warrant. This provision was attached to a Defense Spending bill that Obama could not have vetoed. Coming right after the fiasco after the national debt, vetoing the bill would have taken a wrecking ball to the economy. I saw a lot of idiots blame Obama for this without even mentioning the names of those who endorsed this amendment. Democrats would eat their own young if the Republicans served them up with a good sauce.

On another point, after 3.5 years, I know of no major official in the Obama administration involved in any sort of political corruption. There is nothing at all like Cheney’s secret meetings with energy company executives in writing an energy law, or hundreds of billions of dollars of no-bid contracts that allowed cash to go straight from the Federal treasury and into the pockets of those corporate donors.

I could be suffering from confirmation bias – simply blocking from my mind any evidence that contradicts my hypothesis. I will leave it up to others to potentially identify some major scandal that I might have missed. “Fast and Furious” – the only major scandal I am aware of – provides some hints of incompetence but no hints of corruption.

On the fact that the government appears to be deadlocked, we have a situation where Group A is willing to go 75% of the way towards a compromise, while Group B refuses to go even 10% of the way. This leaves a more-than-15% gap that prevents any type of agreement. Yet, it is absolutely insane to say that both parties deserve equal blame for the deadlock. That's the message we get from the press that has abandoned sense for the illusion of fairness. What they call fair is not even, actually, fair. Is it fair to hold those willing to go 75% of the distance deserve equal blame for the lack of compromise?

Ultimately, I am an economic conservative. I think that the welfare of the people of the United States depends on getting an economic conservative in the White House. However, an economic conservative is NOT somebody who thinks that a corporate leader has a right to poison people for a profit. An economic conservative does not think that corporate executives must be kept in their multi-million dollar jobs and multi-million dollar houses while their fraud is the cause of regular people losing their home and their jobs. An economic conservative does not believe in an open and unregulated public warehouse but, instead, a warehouse regulated by a pricing system that prohibits the use of force, fraud, and deceptive manipulations such as “bundling” garbage loans together in such a way that they hide bad loans in a package with a AAA credit rating. All of those executives should be unemployed and homeless.

However, disagreeing with Obama on matters of policy is quite different from the moral corruption of the Bush administration.

I long for the day that economic conservatives in general will simply recoil at the filth that they are politically allied with.

4 comments:

You surely cannot mean that you are quite impressed with his policies? It is one thing to say that you cannot blame Obama for a series of terrible acts carried out by his orders. It is another thing to say that you are impressed with the guy.

He has had some difficult situations to work with. To illustrate the problem, imagine a case in which a villain has broken into a man’s home and taken him and his 10-year-old daughter hostage. He tells the man, “Either you have sex with your daughter while I watch, or I will take this small butane torch and slowly burn every inch of skin on your daughter’s body.”

He was able to withdraw from Iraq and plan a timetable for exit from Afghanistan by 2014, despite vehement opposition and hysterical objections to both proposals by the GOP. I could probably sympathize with your point of view if Obama simply continued Bush's atrocities and did not escalate them. But, in many respects, he has piled on and made the situation worse.

Moreover, Obama and the Democratic Party need to grow some thicker skin and learn to bite back. The GOP has always been very, very effective at disseminating propaganda. They are so effective, in fact, that the population has been beguiled into comical instances of doublethink from their efforts. The Democrat Party is just starting to learn and ape their tricks (as evidence by Obama's recent attacks on Bain Capital), which could work to their advantage in the future. All else being equal, it would give Obama more room to implement populist reforms. Then he would have much less of an excuse for his behavior.

I guess what I am trying to say is this: Obama needs to grow a pair and not be afraid to have an opinion. Yes, compromising is an essential value, but it is a value that he does not have. The way he handled the ersatz debt ceiling crisis and the Grand Bargain convinced me that he conflates compromising with complete caving.

The lack of support the Administration got on this issue [closing Gitmo] taught them an important lesson - supporting judicial rights in America is a waste of time.

Only in this particular instance. Why? It was because the GOP had the potential to stonewall Obama by blocking funds. When it came to the American citizen ordered killed, that was all Obama. He had no recourse to blame the Republicans on that one. He is the Commander-in-Chief. He makes military decisions. And he consciously chose to murder an American citizen without giving him due process when he could have refrained from doing so. The same thing applies to killing Awlaki's 16-year old son, and all the other horrendous military atrocities committed via drone warfare (and documented by Jeremy Scahill and others) in Yemen, Pakistan and elsewhere on his watch. When it comes to strictly military matters, Obama is the monarch. He is the CEO, the ultimate "Decider," as Bush II would say.

As long as voters demand that a sitting President be willing to kill American citizens shown to be working for enemies of the country without a trial, then that is the type of President we will have.

The American people are stupid and ignorant. They will change opinion depending on how you frame the issue. For example:

Do you think it was just for Obama to kill Anwar Al-Awlaki, a confirmed member of Al Queda? A majority would probably say yes.

Do you think it was just for Obama to kill Anwar Al-Awlaki, an American citizen, without any due process whatsoever, even thought the Constitution grants every American the right to due process? A majority would probably say no.

Moreover, if it was Bush II who had done it, you would probably have seen even higher majorities in opposition to the extrajudicial killing (since Bush II had a reputation for being a stupid, trigger-happy redneck and Obama has branded himself as being a more aplomb and deliberating type).

I also take issue with your notion that Americans "demanded" extrajudicial assassination. That makes it seem like you had Tea Party rallies in the streets calling for Obama to forgo due process and kill the guy. What actually happened was: Obama did it, and nobody really gave a shit. Americans either don't follow politics or they passively accept (then quickly forget) what the so-called "experts" in the mainstream media tell them. Americans are--or have become, I should say--too leaden and docile to be critical thinkers; this is due, in part, to a culture of rampant consumerism and overworking, and also from the literal manufacturing of consent by leaders.

I hold in moral contempt those who condemn Obama because of the continuing of these policies.

Again, this presupposes that he was coerced, by threat of usurpation or a one-term presidency. There are matters where he has absolute power as Commander-in-Chief. He had the power to refrain from killing Awlaki and instead ask Ali Abdullah Saleh to arrest and extradite him to the US, which they could have done. If he had done this, I highly doubt that the GOP could have mounted an attack against him.

However, the President is not all-powerful in this country. The voters are.

The voters have been made inert by propaganda. They rarely vote based on policy; most of the focus is on personalities. Consider the fact that, over history, 9 out of 10 American Presidents have outspent their opponents. This is a very surprising fact on the hypothesis that voters are the ones who are in control. Sure, they have the potential to be in control, but it doesn't follow that they actually are.

Another example of this misguided judgment comes from those who condemn the Obama administration for a law allowing the US. Military to detain US citizens without a warrant.

It did not grant that privilege. That is an urban myth that arose out of a very elementary misinterpretation of the NDAA by Glenn Greenwald.

After 3.5 years, I know of no major official in the Obama administration involved in any sort of political corruption.

I can point out a few. Who did Obama appoint to his economics team? Larry Summers, Timothy Geithner and Hank Paulson. Those three assholes should be getting subpoenas, not positions in Obama's cabinet.

And during his Presidency, there has been virtually ZERO prosecution of the institutionalized fraud, crime, and financial follies of Wall St. that lead up to the subprime crisis. Banksters were pushing debt on people they knew would default; they sold toxic CDOs to clients, telling them that they were profitable and safe, then they bet on those same CDOs to fail. It got so bad that the FBI warned of an impending mortgage fraud epidemic in 2004, but they naturally got ignored. The financial crisis was probably inevitable, but the criminal machinations and systemic fraud of the Wall St. banks exacerbated it beyond anything imaginable. These banking crooks in JP Morgan, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and various other financial institutions, are responsible for the destruction of tens of trillions of dollars of wealth in the global economy, impoverishing countless innocent people and reducing many to veritable debt peonage. What has Obama done about this? SWEET FUCK ALL. In this respect, he is far more to the right than Reagan was. During the S&L crisis in the Eighties, at least the Reagan Administration fired and prosecuted the perpetrators responsible!

On the fact that the government appears to be deadlocked, we have a situation where Group A is willing to go 75% of the way towards a compromise, while Group B refuses to go even 10% of the way. This leaves a more-than-15% gap that prevents any type of agreement. Yet, it is absolutely insane to say that both parties deserve equal blame for the deadlock.

I agree that Obama did not deserve all the blame for this. However, there is a legitimate reason to condemn him: he completely caved in. John Boehner was even quoted as saying he got "98% of what he wanted." The whole debt ceiling debacle, at the end of the day, was a charade, and Obama, being a Constitutional lawyer, perfectly well knew it. There was about two or three different ways he could have raised the debt ceiling, by executive order, yet he chose not to.

Ultimately, I am an economic conservative...

What is an "economic conservative?" Do you believe that cutting taxes for the rich will get the economy moving again? Are you for a flat tax and less regulation? Do you believe that food stamps and assistance to the poor are counterproductive and create a culture of dependency? Is the US health-care system best left controlled by for-profit insurance companies? Do you consider the economy to be supply-led rather than demand-led?

Based on what I have read on your blog, you seem to be more of a moderate.

About Me

When I was in high school, I decided that I wanted to leave the world better off than it would have been if I had not existed. This started a quest, through 12 years of college and on to today, to try to discover what a "better" world consists of. I have written a book describing that journey that you can find on my website. In this blog, I will keep track of the issues I have confronted since then.